Trump says midterms will end the Iran war, months after his White House swore they wouldn't touch it.

…(cont) VFW hall. The only person in the building was a man refilling a coffee urn, and he said the roster hadn't been kept since the nineties, but there was a radio going on the folding table behind him, and the man on it was reading off a report that Iran had used something called an electro-optical missile for the first time, aimed at a U.S. warship, and that analysts had found construction speeding up at an underground nuclear site the Iranians call Pickaxe Mountain — the same site, the radio said, the administration's been talking about striking. The coffee man said try the district office, they handle veterans' affairs and might know who handles the rest.

District office. Closed early — a sign taped to the glass said back at one, but somebody had also taped a printed statement to the door, dated the second of September, where the White House said flat out that the coming midterms would not alter the timeline for the war in Iran. I stood there and read it twice, because I'd just written down, an hour before, that the same White House now says the war ends right after those same midterms. That's two buildings and two different answers about the same clock, and I hadn't asked either building anything about a clock. I'd asked about my grandson.

Fifth stop — a liaison desk at the strip mall past the tire place, the kind of office that shares a parking lot with a nail salon. The woman there was kind about it, said Selective Service compliance for eighteen-year-olds isn't something her office tracks either, tried the number for me anyway, got a recording. That's five buildings, if you're counting, and not one of them had anything to do with my grandson.

She was walking me to the door when she mentioned, like it was nothing, that the Navy had struck three Iranian oil tankers the Saturday before, after Iran fired on an aircraft carrier and a destroyer, and that Iran had answered by declaring, the day after, some kind of exclusion zone around the strait the oil moves through. All of that — the tankers, the missile, the exclusion zone — happened in the seven days between the White House swearing the midterms wouldn't move the war and the President saying the midterms would end it.

So here's what I've got, and maybe you can tell me, because five buildings couldn't: if the war's timeline was fixed on the second of September, untouched by any election, what moved between then and the ninth to make the election the whole timeline?